Building upon the original goals of the BWF Preterm Birth Initiative, a recently convened Pregnancy Think Tank has helped shape the next generation of BWF preterm birth awards. Growing evidence suggests the interrelatedness of the duration of pregnancy, fetal growth, and adverse pregnancy outcomes such as preterm birth, preeclampsia, intrauterine growth restriction, stillbirth, and maternal medical complications including maternal mortality.

Other areas of interest are climate change and environmental impact on pregnancy, complications associated with ART, and epigenome-wide association studies.

We seek to expand the scope of this award mechanism to capture these and other pregnancy outcomes as we believe they will be mutually informative and accelerate discovery. Each award will continue to provide up to $500,000 over a four-year period ($125,000 per year).

The initiative is designed to stimulate both creative individual scientists and multi-investigator teams to approach healthy and adverse pregnancy outcomes using creative basic and translation science methods. The formation of new connections between reproductive scientists and investigators who are involved in other areas is particularly encouraged.